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“You’re great at murder,” Siegfried Sassoon wrote in his most pointed broadside at the men he once fought alongside, but the line was never published.

Now, a century after the start of the First World War, an original draft of his poem Atrocities — thought to have been heavily censored — has been read in public for the first time. The poem, which describes soldiers boasting of killing prisoners of war, was altered to remove its barbed and graphic lines.

The draft says the soldiers “gulp their blood in ghoulish dreams”, and included the line “You’re great at murder”, but these were

On this day: July 31, 1915
Through all the exultant articles in which the Germans are celebrating the achievements of their armies on the eastern frontier and foretelling their triumphal entry into Warsaw and the immense results that are to follow it, there runs a note of uneasiness and almost of alarm